Christina Emma Saville

About

Christina is a Senior Research Fellow within the Workforce and Health Systems theme in Health Sciences. She has been researching nurse staffing since 2017. This work has been funded by National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Applied Research Collaboration (ARC) Wessex and NIHR grants.

Christina’s background is in Operational Research, the branch of Mathematics that uses advanced quantitative techniques to help make better decisions. She is interested in how Operational Research techniques can be applied to decisions in healthcare, particularly staffing decisions.

Research

Research groups

Member of:

Research interests

Safe staffing
Operational research techniques applied to healthcare
Health workforce

Current research

Currently Christina is leading a work package of a large NIHR HS&DR-funded project on configurations of staffing in hospitals. This involves working with 4 hospitals and a third-party roster provider to analyse the relationship between ward staffing levels and a range of outcomes. Christina is curating a database that links data from different sources and standardising the data from different hospitals into a consistent format. She is fitting a range of multi-level regression models to test the link between staffing levels and patient/staff outcomes after adjusting for patient risk and other factors.

To complement this, she is organising a review of the literature to understand what economic evaluations of nurse staffing have been carried out so far. So far this has involved leading the design of the search strategy, and coordinating title and article screening and data extraction activities. The review protocol is available here: https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero, under RecordID 281202.

Alongside this she is working to promote the team’s research and influence practice including working with NHS Improvement to update staffing guidance and being Lead Editor of Evidence Briefs that are published in the Nursing Times.